De Palma Accepts a Blockbuster MISSION

Thursday, September 22nd, 2016

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on Mission: Impossible was written by JJ Bersch, PhD candidate in UW Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. A 35mm print of Mission: Impossible will kick off the final night in our Brian De Palma series on Friday, September 23 at 7 p.m. Mission: Impossible will be followed by De Palma's other major blockbuster, The Untouchables, at 9 p.m.

On May 18, 1996, Cleveland hip-hop group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony achieved a level of success that previously seemed unimaginable; their somber but celebratory single “Tha Crossroads” reached the top position on the Billboard Hot 100. The song—written in remembrance of their recently deceased mentor Eazy-E—opens with the following lines: “Now tell me what you gonna do / When it ain’t nowhere to run / When judgment comes for you / When judgment comes for you.”

These were the words you likely would have heard on the radio while driving to the multiplex to see Mission: Impossible on its opening weekend, and if you had followed any of the press leading up to its release, you probably would have felt like judgment had been coming for the film well before then. Take the following introduction from a prerelease Entertainment Weekly story: “Good morning, Mr. Phelps. This microchip contains a photograph of Brian De Palma, director of Mission: Impossible. De Palma has vanished from the realm of movie hyping without a trace. Although publicists for the film deny any knowledge of his whereabouts, sources close to the director say he chose to make himself scarce after a series of creative battles with Impossible star Tom Cruise. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to make sure this movie doesn't self-destruct…”

Budgeted at $85 million, Mission: Impossible was easily the most expensive film De Palma had ever directed—his previous biggest budget was $47 million for 1990’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, a critical and commercial flop—and the strains of blockbuster filmmaking were evident throughout the production process. Some of the problems stemmed from this very budget; EW claims that Paramount executives wanted to “keep the budget for the film in the $40 to $50 million range,” but that Tom Cruise’s “vision” called “for a big, showy action piece” that brought it closer to $62 million. Others came from the screenplay; it went through a troubling set of revisions, with Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp receiving $1 million to revamp an earlier script by husband-and-wife team Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. His version called for an extremely dark and deadly opening to the film, and original cast members of the Mission: Impossible television series such as Peter Graves and Martin Landau were outspoken in the press about their concerns over the film’s tone and its treatment of the source material.

And then there’s the matter of De Palma’s relationship with Cruise. Here, again, is Entertainment Weekly: “Trouble between the director and the star-producer supposedly flared throughout the production. ‘Brian had the s--- beaten out of him by Tom and Paula [Wagner, coproducer],’ says a De Palma crony. ‘Tom second-guessed everything he did. One of the reasons the movie went over budget is that Cruise would change his mind at the last minute. 'I want this couch to be red, not beige.' Things like that. I think Brian felt pulverized during the making of this film.’ Pulverized enough to ditch Mission's press junket earlier this month.”

Yet almost none of these difficulties are apparent in the film itself. As Cineaste writes, “Although Brian De Palma's name was all but ignored in the prerelease ballyhoo for this summer blockbuster, the vision behind this witty adaptation of the hit TV spy series of the Sixties is very recognizable.” From the voyeurism and “movieness” of the film’s opening moments to the discomfort provided by the level of viewer knowledge in the film’s central set piece, Mission: Impossible is pretty soundly a Brian De Palma film. It is smaller, darker, and more contemplative than most of the series’ later entries, and probably a lot more confusing, but that’s part of the film’s enduring appeal; few popcorn films have ever had this much fun in the murkiness of the shadows.

Two full decades later, the franchise is still running strong and loud; the most recent, 2015’s Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation, was released to critical and commercial success, and industry trades have spent this summer detailing the salary disputes that temporarily halted production on the next. Whether it be John Woo’s stylistic excess, J.J. Abrams’s misguided attempt to center the series around familial drama, or the brief moment studio executives thought they could hand over the series to Jeremy Renner, Cruise and his varying crews at IMF have time and again proven that they will always find somewhere to run, even when it ain’t nowhere to run.

De Palma, however, does not seem likely to run with it (or blockbuster Hollywood), again. In response to a question about the series from Moviefone in 2013, De Palma quips, “It always amazed me why somebody would want to make one thing over and over again. I think Tom has done a fantastic job in keeping this franchise going. It's just, aesthetically, it holds no interest in me. It's all about economics. Why would you want to keep making Mission: Impossibles?”

Even if he cannot, you will probably be able to find the answer (or a couple of answers) in De Palma’s film.

The international trailer for Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) offered a compelling pull quote from The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, stating that Kon’s film proved “that Japanese animators are reaching for the moon, while most of their American counterparts remain stuck in the kiddie sandbox.” The quote never made Dargis’ print review, but resonates in a trailer filled with fantastic imagery. Her words underscore a promise for experimentation and mature themes delivered by a national cinema committed to exploring animation’s full potential. In practice, Paprika over-delivers on this promise, not only demonstrating the diversity of Japan’s animation but also the mastery of a director at the height of his expressive powers.

In the opening sequence of the film, Detective Kogawa Toshimi wanders through his own dream, accompanied by the dream therapist Paprika. The two flit between environments as a circus bleeds into a jungle, then a train, a crowded dock on the water, and a hotel hallway that spans into an endless horizon. Kon transitions between these settings through a series of matches on action, creating a sense of continuity amidst these discordant shifts. In other words, the film’s match cuts help to reinforce the coherence of an otherwise incoherent dream. Kon further complicates this sequence by undermining the dreamer’s identity, such as when the circus crowd suddenly mimics the detective’s appearance and charges him, or by having the world of the dream deteriorate at its end. All this happens in less than three minutes, setting the tone for a film that subverts the boundaries of waking life and fantasy.

Paprika also signaled the culmination of themes that had preoccupied Kon throughout his career. In Perfect Blue (1997), the director used disjunctive edits to disrupt a character’s sense of reality and identity. In Millennium Actress (2001), he used an unconventional narrative structure and matches on action to show an aged actress shifting into past roles and memories. And in Tokyo Godfathers (2003), admittedly the most conventional of Kon’s films, the director privileged characters who are, for one reason or another, haunted by their past while living in a stagnated present. Throughout Kon’s cinema, characters are not always who they say they are or even who they think they are. Notions of identity, memory, and reality remain constantly in flux and the world reflects that uncertainty in increasingly bold and nuanced ways.

These motifs find fruition in Satoshi Kon’s final film. In Paprika, the therapist Dr. Atsuko Chiba gains the ability to enter the dreams of her patients using a device called the DC Mini. Once there, she assumes the appearance and wholly changed personality of her alter-ego Paprika. In real life, Dr. Chiba appears reserved and thoughtful. In the dream world, Paprika is suddenly free and vivacious. Presumably, the dream allows Dr. Chiba to express a part of her personality that remains carefully controlled, and in some respects repressed, in the real world. However, after the DC Mini is stolen, reality and dreams begin to merge and the environment that once gave Dr. Chiba affirmation and freedom becomes compromised by the ill will of other dreamers. As the film spirals, Dr. Chiba must resolve her conflicted sense of self and past suppression of emotions, all while navigating a dream world that devolves into a nightmare. In the end, the film refuses to give its viewers level footing, embracing a radical narrative progression that prioritizes imagination and emotional engagement above all else.

Satoshi Kon’s career was short-lived. He died of pancreatic cancer four years after completing Paprika, at the age of 42. However, with just four films and a televised series to his name, he managed to push the boundaries of style and storytelling in ways that captured the full power of his medium. Unlike some artists who died before their time, we do not have to lament potential left unrealized. Among Satoshi Kon’s limited oeuvre, his first film Perfect Blue and last film Paprika stand out as unquestionable masterpieces. They are films that not only experiment with animation in formally exciting ways but do so while telling stories that make use of animation’s ability to show us a world that can change or dissolve or reconfigure itself at will. And while Perfect Blue was conceived amidst the opening gambit of a new movement in Japanese animation—joined by influential works like Akira (1988), Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Ghost in the Shell (1995), and Princess Mononoke (1997)—Paprika in many ways marked that movement’s zenith. One only wishes that Kon lived long enough to tackle the unenviable task of following up such a critical success.

When NAUSICAÄ Became WARRIORS OF THE WIND

Tuesday, September 6th, 2016

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on the original American theatrical release of Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind were written by WUD Film's James LaPierre, co-programmer for the Cinematheque's ongoing "Heroines of Anime" series. The original, full-length Japanese version of Nausicaä will screen in a 35mm subtitled print on Saturday, September 10 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

By James LaPierre

Princess Mononoke was released in Japan in July 1997 to massive critical and commercial success- the film quickly became the highest-grossing Japanese film of the year. When director Hayao Miyazaki was approached by Miramax Films’ CEO Harvey Weinstein about its U.S. distribution, Weinstein demanded that the film be heavily edited in order to appeal to American audiences. Offended by Weinstein’s insistence on modifying his work, Miyazaki left the meeting in anger. Days later, famed Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki sent a katana sword to Weinstein’s office, with an attached note reading “No cuts.” Miramax heard Miyazaki’s message loud and clear- the film was eventually released theatrically in the U.S. in its original, unedited form. When asked about the incident in a 2005 interview with The Guardian, Miyazaki simply smiled and remarked “I defeated him.”

Why did Miyazaki react defensively when told his film would be recut? The answer dates back to the U.S. release of his earlier 1987 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Upon Nausicaä’s release in Japan, the film was met with critical acclaim- leading to the creation of Studio Ghibli shortly thereafter and the desire for Miyazaki to export his work outside of Japan. In 1984, production/distribution company New World Pictures was tasked with bringing the film to United States audiences. A 95-minute recut and English-language dub of the film titled Warriors of the Wind was released theatrically in 1985 with a VHS home video version available shortly thereafter. The plot of the film was modified to more closely resemble a traditional children’s action-adventure movie, and all promotional images featured a slew of male characters, none of which appear in the film. Many of the film's character names were changed (including titular character Princess Nausicaä who became Princess Zandra), and the voice actors working on the film were not told the film's plot line before recording their lines- simply put, Warriors of the Wind was an inferior and distorted version of Miyazaki’s original masterwork. To this day, it remains his only film to have been stripped down for U.S. distribution.

Fortunately, New World Picture’s rights to Nausicaä expired in 1995, leaving it up to Miyazaki and his team to find a new U.S. distributor for his films. In 1996, The Walt Disney Company reached an agreement with Tokuma Shoten (Miyazaki’s publisher)- the deal gave Disney the theatrical and home video distribution rights to most Studio Ghibli films (including Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind). In 2003, a new English dub of the film was announced with both Patrick Stewart and Uma Thurman cast. The uncut, original 117-minute version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released on DVD in the United States in 2005, containing Disney's new dub as well as an improved subtitle translation. This improved version is now available widely on home video, and is the version that will be shown on 35mm for Cinematheque's screening of the film on September 10th.

Nausicaä Scenes Absent in Warriors of the Wind (Total time of missing scenes: 23:36 min)

* Asbel leading Nausicaä to the room full of women with a secret passageway (21 sec)

* Kushana and Kurotowa awaiting the incoming Pejite attack (192 sec)

* Closing credits (98 sec)

3 WOMEN: Altman and the Feminine Mystique

Thursday, April 28th, 2016

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on Robert Altman's 3 Women were written by Matthew Connolly, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at UW Madison. A new 4K restoration of 3 Womenwill screen as part of our "Robert Altman: Five Masterworks" series on Friday, April 29, at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular screening venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue

By Matthew Connolly

“At the time, of course, I was not aware of it. I don’t sit and think, ‘Oh, I’ll use a female character.’ That’s simply what attracted me. I don’t know if that relates particularly to my own life or experience. I don’t know where that interest in strong female characters comes from.” – Robert Altman, in response to critic Graham Fuller’s observation on how his films which “seem to be making personal statements” often “focus on strong female characters.”

Among Robert Altman’s most formally innovative and narratively beguiling works, 3 Women (1977) offers a particularly fruitful example of the filmmaker’s career-long investment in chronicling female identity and experience. This interest has taken many forms and produced varying representational results throughout his career. At his best, he has helped to create (and, just as importantly, given actresses the space to shape) some of the richest and most vibrant female roles in contemporary American cinema: Constance Miller in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Linnea Reese in Nashville (1975), Joanne in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982), Marian Wyman in Short Cuts (1993), to name just a few. Still, even the most ardent Altman acolyte has assuredly cringed at the abrasive, even cruel treatment that women have sometimes received throughout his oeuvre.

Within this body of work, though, 3 Women stands out both for its almost-exclusive focus on female protagonists and its increasingly mysterious handling of their relationships to one another. A physical therapist at a California health spa for the elderly, Millie (Shelley Duvall) is a socially isolated extrovert whose constant attempts to connect with neighbors and co-workers end in derision. She nevertheless becomes an object of adoration for Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), a shy and almost childlike new employee at the spa. The two move in together after Millie’s old roommate moves out, with Millie introducing Pinky to the co-owners of both their apartment building and the bar that Millie frequents: Willie (Janice Rule), pregnant and silent and almost always painting unsetting murals of lizard-like creatures; and her boozy, philandering husband, Edgar (Robert Fortier). A combination of Millie’s blinkered romantic pursuits and Pinky’s blatant attempts to infiltrate herself into Millie’s personal life soon cause friction between the two, leading to a series of bizarre events that cause the personalities of the two women to bleed into one another. To reveal any more to potential first-time viewers is to dampen the elegantly unsettling and slippery maneuvers through which Altman shifts the identities of Willie, Pinky, and Millie. Suffice to say, though, that the Bergman-esque (see Persona, which is screening on May 1) blurring of selves within the film’s second half pushes 3 Women beyond Altman’s usual brand of free-floating, acid-tinged social commentary and into the realm of the surreal.

What to make of the fact – as suggested in the above interview excerpt – that one of Altman’s most explicit forays into art-cinema ambiguity and narrative indeterminacy became so deeply entangled with the mystery of female identity? Critics came up with varying explanations and opinions upon the film’s release in April 1977, with some linking 3 Women’s enigmatic qualities to its well-publicized origins in a dream that Altman had while his wife Kathryn was hospitalized with a duodenal ulcer. In his largely glowing notice, Vincent Canby of The New York Times deemed the film “the moviemaker’s dream more than that of the characters’ within,” adding that “it’s not a narrative in any strict sense but a contemplation of three stages of a woman’s life by a man who appreciates women and may not be without a bit of guilt.” This notion of the film as more male reverie than a contemplation of lived female experience became echoed more critically in articles that discussed the film in relation to larger trends in the representation of women in late-1970s Hollywood. Jane Wilson, also in The New York Times, wrote that 3 Women “speaks powerfully of Altman’s own apprehensions of female nature as it impinges on him in his dreams,” but “hasn’t much to say to women now about themselves, nor does it provide any fresh perceptions about their relationships with one another and with men.”

Historical distance and critical hindsight have done little to resolve such debates. 3 Women’s depiction of the fluctuating friendship between Millie and Pinky possesses all the markers of Altman’s career-long observational acuity, particularly when documenting Millie’s consumerist obsessions fueled by McCall’s and other women’s magazines of the era. (The preparations of her abortive dinner party are a jaw-dropping cavalcade of late-70s processed food.) Yet such comic bite cannot easily be disentangled from Altman’s compassion, especially towards Millie. “She’s simply trying to do the right thing,” Altman told Betty Jeffries Demby in a 1977 interview when discussing Millie’s slavish devotion to all things conventionally feminine, “and what is the right thing? It’s the thing people tell you is right.” In the same interview, his thoughts on the film’s final vision of female solidarity hints at a complicated interweaving of utopian collectivity and unsparing instinct: “The women in 3 Women survive because they are taking care of each other. And they do that because they are forced into it … surviving is stronger than morals. It’s the strongest thing because it’s the least understood and it’s the least logical.”

If the film’s deeply imbricated strands of up-to-the-minute satire and dream logic, anxiety and empathy, ensures that it will remain a productively complicated example of Altman’s larger relationship to female representation, 3 Women also showcases how Altman’s emphasis on collaboration allowed the actresses within his film opportunities to shine that they rarely received elsewhere. Spacek’s perfectly calibrated blankness proves all the more unsettling as Pinky’s obsession deepens and then dissipates, while Duvall (who improvised several of her most memorable monologues) brings such astute comic timing and fierce presence to Millie that her most pedestrian wants and desires take on a shocking depth of feeling. They form an essential center to a film built around ever growing indeterminacy; or, to quote Melissa Anderson, they’re “reminders of a very specific somewhere, the one immutable truth in a film abounding with fantasies.”

WALKER: This is a True Story

Friday, April 8th, 2016

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on Alex Cox's Walker (1987) were written by UW student and WUD Film programmer Vincent Mollica. A 35mm print of Walker will be our final Marquee Monday for the spring season on Monday, April 11 at 7 p.m., in the Marquee Theater at Union South.

By Vincent Mollica

Walker is perhaps the only film of its type: an ornate 19th century period comedy that is also a vicious piece of political agitprop. Walker is about a real life figure named William Walker, a filibuster who imperialized Nicaragua in the 1850s as a means to create a transit route between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Walker eventually took over Nicaragua’s government, declared himself president, and finally, following much international warfare and intrigue around the mishandling of this transit route, he burned Grenada to the ground and fled. Author T.J Stoles describes him as “one of the most dangerous international criminals of the nineteenth century, if not all our history.” Director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy) and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid) depict Walker’s mission of manifest destiny as a fraught, bloody, jungle expedition, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of many.

However, Cox was driven less by his interest in Nicaragua in the 1850s than by his interest in Nicaragua in the 1980s. At this time the leftist Sandinista government, who had recently over thrown Somoza’s dictatorship, was under attack by “contras.” These were counterrevolutionaries who, as revealed in Iran-Contra, were funded by President Reagan’s administration, which was implementing its own subtler form of imperialism. Cox claims that while visiting Nicaragua, two Sandinistas asked if he would make a movie there, planting the seeds of what would become Walker. Of this, Cox later said on his website, “If people like these two lads could overthrow a hated dictator and American stooge, how hard could it be for two gringos to scam some money in the USA, bring it back and make a movie about Nicaraguan history, Nicaraguan reality?” In making a Hollywood film almost entirely in Nicaragua, using William Walker’s invasion as an explicit allegory of US-Nicaraguan relations at the time, Cox did just that (if you need that proved, just stay for the film’s end credits, which may go down as one of the most explicitly political moments in Hollywood film).

Using visual anachronisms, like props of Time magazine or Coke bottles strewn in period setting, Cox draws these two periods of American history together. These anachronisms are a good example of how Walker moves far away from a realistic style, embracing lunacy over honesty. With its barrage of sight gags, over the top violence and cartoonish performances, the world of Walker barely resembles our own. Speaking on and pointing out these stylistic elements on the film’s DVD commentary, Cox claims “we’re struggling against a conventional narrative, we’re working in a revolutionary country and we’re trying to make a film that is itself revolutionary.” This was not a film to passively view, reflect on, and agree with, but a film that would confront and agitate viewers.

Not all the film’s politics are so loud though. As Cox gets at in his commentary, at different parts of the film, the story will pause and focus on small moments and dialogues, to investigate the racial, ethnic, and gender politics debated among its different characters. Walker and his black right hand man exchange passages from Walker’s own journal to debate his instatement of slavery; a real life Sandinista actor works to inform audiences of the contra point of view by acting in the film as a Walker sympathizer who walks through a street Walker’s army has ravaged screaming Walker’s praises; Walker’s politically engaged deaf fiancé (Marlee Matlin) confronts him for mistranslating her sign language to other politicians and generally calling out his spinelessness. These moments are political and often stylistically “revolutionary” in their own, smaller way.

Of course, the film was a complete failure which ensured Cox was locked out of Hollywood for the rest of his career. In a short feature on the Criterion DVD, Cox goes through various negative reviews from the film’s release, which mostly chide it for it being “clever.” It’s perhaps understandable that critics—and audiences—were not quite ready to embrace Cox’s aggressive attitude and disregard for convention, but it’s a shame nonetheless. It’s also a shame that—like 1987’s other US-Policy related Hollywood super-flop, Ishtar—the film has never developed the cult audience a film like Repo Man has (it doesn’t even carry Ishtar’s infamy). Even removed from its political nature, the film’s loud, punk aesthetic is deeply satisfying. It gives a transgressive sense of clutter and disarray, that only a Hollywood budget can allow, that also doesn’t feel too exhausting or unfocused. It’s richly deserving of a second life, if only as a reminder of how subversive and experimental a Hollywood film—let alone a Hollywood comedy—can be.

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER: The Richest Gift a Body Could Have

Thursday, April 7th, 2016

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on Charles Laughton's masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter (1955), were written by UW student and WUD Film programmer Vincent Mollica. A 35mm print of The Night of the Hunter, from the UCLA Film and Television Archive, will be the first screening in the Cinematheque's "One and Done" series on Saturday, April 9 at 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

By Vincent Mollica

If I were to choose a single film to introduce someone, of any age, to classic cinema, it would be The Night of the Hunter, a southern gothic-thriller whose great stylishness and emotional depth make it endlessly watchable. Director Charles Laughton was known primarily as an actor, both on stage and on screen, working with many of the most famous filmmakers of the 1930s-1960s such as Alfred Hitchcock, Leo McCarey and Billy Wilder. In the early 1950s Laughton worked with producer Paul Gregory on a bible reading tour as well as theater directing work, before Gregory helped Laughton direct his first and only Hollywood film.

Set in the midst of the Depression, The Night of the Hunter is about a young boy, John, and his younger sister, Pearl, whose father is sent to death row after a bank heist gone wrong. John’s final moment with his father is right before the police whisk him away, in front of their West Virginia home, as he entrusts John with hiding his stolen booty. In prison John’s father meets Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a woman-murdering psychopath in preacher’s clothing. Upon learning of his hidden prize, Powell leaves prison to ingratiate himself in John and Pearl’s lives by taking advantage of their lonely mother (Shelly Winters). The film becomes a mind game between Powell and the ever vigilant John who wants nothing more than to protect his father’s honor.

To his great credit, Laughton didn’t squander his time in the director’s chair by making an anonymous actors picture. He thrills his audience by creating a rich, unique, visual world for John and Pearl to get lost in, as laid out in the invaluable featurette, “The Making of the Night of the Hunter” on the Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD release. In it author Preston Neal Jones explains that Laughton made the film to return viewers to the era of silent film where he felt they engaged with films on a more active level. Jones and academic Jeffrey Couchman show how the filmmakers set out to create the film’s world from a child’s point of view. They applied stripped down sets, mimicking what a child might notice, and formed expressionistic visuals and special effects to evoke the world of a nightmare (helped in great part by Stanley Cortez’s stark lighting). In skillfully using the medium of film as fully as any of the auteurs he worked under as an actor, Laughton made a film world that thrills and excites an audience in a timeless way.

Although there is clearly great technical skill on the screen, what has always had the most immediate effect on me as a viewer are the film’s performances. Most famous is Robert Mitchum as Harry Powell, whose high theatricality and flair, used to con and manipulate everyone he meets, is constantly on. The drive that Mitchum possesses is especially notable in the film’s final moments, after he has been arrested, and it is as if all the life has drained from his body, reducing him to a human rag doll. Perhaps more than any other one element of the film, there is nothing more reliably entertaining and engrossing than Mitchum’s mannered villainy. My favorite moment with Mitchum is a rare scene where I think we see past this persona. It’s the moment right before he kills Shelly Winters where, in an extravagant long shot, he tenderly reaches to the heavens while, as revealed in a later close up, his face ominously twitches. Benefitted by the shadow on his body and face, which allows us to partly fill in Powell’s emotion ourselves, it comes off as a much more private, genuinely religious, version of Powell.

The second listed adult lead is Lillian Gish, as Ms. Cooper, who protects the children from Powell in the film’s final act. Gish was a carryover from the silent cinema of D.W. Griffith, a director whose work had inspired Laughton and that he had studied in preparation for the film. She transforms her lines, many of which are meant to underline the film’s themes about survival and the durability of youth, from the potentially tacky into something weary and beautiful. However, it’s Billy Chapin that gets my favorite moment of the film. It comes at the very end as Chapin runs, crying, to the arrested, broken Powell, who he begs to just take the money, mirroring his final scene with his father. This scene’s unexpected complexity and sadness haunted me so much when I first saw the film at age 10, I felt the need to try to explain it to anyone who would listen.

Night of the Hunter’s initial commercial failure, which crushed the insecure Laughton, meant he was only allowed create such a rich vision once (his follow up would have been an adaptation of Norman Mailer's novel The Naked and the Dead), which gives an added tragic quality to the film. However, despite this failure The Night of the Hunter has rightfully risen higher and higher in the ranks of the canon of great American cinema over the intervening 60 years. It even spawned a few worthwhile pseudo-remakes: the subversive anti-Reagan slasher The Stepfather, David Gordon Green’s dreamy Undertow and of course Radio Raheem’s take on Mitchum’s Love and Hate speech in Do the Right Thing. Like many “great” pieces of cinema it’s maybe best to not overthink its myriad qualities, as touched on here, while watching the film, and rather let the film come back to you later, piecemeal, like a dream. Watch the film as Laughton intended it to be seen: On the edge of your seat, attention rapt. As if a child.

Tales of THE TALES OF HOFFMANN

Tuesday, March 29th, 2016

Posted byJim Healy

These notes on Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffmann were written by Jenny Oyallon-Koloski, Ph.D candidate in the Communication Arts Department of UW Madison. A newly restored version of The Tales of Hoffmann will screen on Saturday, April 2 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. The screening is co-presented by Madison Opera, whose production of Tales of Hoffmann will be presented April 15 & 17.

By Jenny Oyallon-Koloski

In the fall of 1950, the British fan magazine PictureGoer described The Tales of Hoffmann as a “pure essay in musical fantasy” and “the biggest film experiment since ‘The Red Shoes.’” In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to find contemporary reviews of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s cinematic endeavor that don’t evoke or make the comparison to the duo’s earlier production, The Red Shoes (1948), a melodrama about the alluring yet sinister world of ballet. The two projects are difficult to separate, given that The Red Shoes laid the groundwork for The Tales of Hoffmann’s marketing and formal experimentation.

The Tales of Hoffmann adapts Jacques Offenbach’s final opera. While waiting to meet the prima ballerina he idolizes, Hoffmann (Robert Rounseville) drunkenly recounts the tales of three of his lost loves: Olympia, an automaton; Giulietta, a courtesan; and Antonia, a consumptive singer. Powell and Pressburger were in part able to put this film into production as a result of The Red Shoes’ international financial success. Producers, as a result, viewed The Red Shoes as a model for selling British prestige pictures abroad. Even though The Tales of Hoffmann adapts an opera, advertising for the film explicitly emphasized images of its ballet dancers over its singers in the ads to indicate the presence of balletic content and draw attention to the overlap of casting between the two films—of dancers Moira Shearer (as both Stella and Olympia), Leonide Massine, and Robert Helpmann, especially. The film’s producers made a point to sell the film’s appeal to American audiences, PictureGoer reports, choosing to premiere the film in the United States instead of Britain, and creating buzz by holding that premiere at the Metropolitan Opera House, making it the first film “ever to be shown at the tradition-bound Met.” Not only was Tales of Hoffmann breaking barriers for cinematic opera, the reviewer suggests, it was expanding the horizons of operatic conventions in general.

Comparisons between the films arise equally because the filmmaking duo saw The Tales of Hoffmann as doing for opera what The Red Shoes did for ballet, and marketed it as such. “The ‘Red Shoes’ Line will be Adapted for ‘Tales of Hoffmann,’” touts Box Office in 1951. Critics were mixed on the earlier film’s narrative qualities but praised its technical achievements and balletic sequences, proving that traditional ballet on screen could be financially profitable. Audiences were equally taken with the visual spectacle of the dancing and impressive set pieces, qualities that Powell and Pressburger sought to re-create in Tales of Hoffmann, this time with the addition of an operatic context. Yet despite the shift in source material, The Tales of Hoffmann contains more dancing than The Red Shoes (as well as a looser narrative), with the ballet sequences largely upstaging the musical performances.

Ultimately, The Tales of Hoffmann did not achieve the critical and audience favor of the earlier Red Shoes; the trade press warns exhibitors that the film’s episodic structure, long running time, and dialogue presented exclusively through song could be challenging to certain demographics, especially those seeking an “evening’s relaxation” at the movies. The film lacks at times the narrative redundancy common in Hollywood cinema, rewarding instead the viewer who devotes their full attention to the stories developing on screen. And you’ll want to: The Tales of Hoffman provides plenty of audiovisual stimuli to delight the senses.

Variety praised the film for its technical achievements, pointing to its inventive use of effects and Technicolor, excellent casting and performance choices, and a “brilliant integration of dance, story and music.” Opera connoisseurs will recognize musical strains from the Jacques Offenbach opera that bears the same name, but there is much in the film to visually impress operatic amateurs. The filmmakers create a variety of optical effects to accompany sequences like the opening “Dragonfly Ballet,” including selective blurring to enhance the sense of blurred motion evoked by Shearer’s fluttering movements. The production consists exclusively of abstract, impressive set pieces, including an early illusion as we shift between shots of a flat scenery wall to one that is painted and filled with posed performers—in the style of living portraits—who join in the fun as Hoffmann recounts his first tale. Powell and Pressburger do not focus their efforts exclusively on the aesthetic qualities of these nested operatic and balletic scenes however; the vignettes also include moments that humorously undercut the flawlessness of the performers (and their athletic bodies) seen elsewhere in the production. We can observe some farcical, mickey-moused gags at the end of Olympia’s number as her neck extends with a rising musical note in the score. The humor becomes more perverse and grotesque, however, when Olympia is torn apart by her makers who then fight and beat one another with her dismembered body parts. With a little something for everyone, Tales of Hoffmann is truly a spectacle of color, movement, and music.

IL BRIGANTE screening postponed

Thursday, March 17th, 2016

Posted byJim Healy

Due to a shipping problem, our screening of the new restored Il Brigante, part of our New Italian Restoration series, has been postponed. Originally scheduled to screen on Saturday, March 19 at 2 p.m., Il Brigante will now screen on Saturday, April 2, at 2 p.m. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Alexander Payne on I KNEW HER WELL

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016

Posted byJim Healy

"My favorite national cinemas, other than American, are Japanese and Italian from the forties to the seventies—and particularly from the fifties and sixties. As one continues to dig, one finds in this period an inexhaustible supply of gems, and I Knew Her Well is nothing short of pay dirt. It stands with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso, and Antonioni’s trilogy as a brilliant—and brilliantly entertaining—document of Italy’s contradictions in the second decade after the war, and, like Antonioni, Pietrangeli put women at the center of his films. Here winds of both sadness and compassion blow through his portrait of an aspiring starlet who moves to Rome and, in a series of minutely observed episodes, allows herself to be used by a string of men. The perfectly cast Stefania Sandrelli plays Adriana, a wannabe who realizes too late the pointlessness of her dreams. Pretty much everyone who sees this movie is blown away.”

In the November 1960 issue of the Swedish film journal Chaplin, then unknown Frenchman Ernest Riffe inveighed against the films of Ingmar Bergman. Riffe declaimed that Bergman’s “deep misanthropy” and “lack of contact with his surroundings” foreclosed any possibility that his work might approximate “originality,” and that his continued filmmaking confirmed the poverty of his writing, for which he had “never [...] been well-regarded [...] in his homeland” and for which he “suffered under the contempt from his literary colleagues.” Such allegations were not without intellectual or popular support. Indeed, that single issue of Chaplain contained three critiques of Bergman’s work from three preeminent Swedish film critics.

Moreover, the landscape in which films were produced and circulated, and the aesthetics of “European art cinema” were shifting. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sweden witnessed a significant decline in cinema attendance, with the nation’s film production making up an increasingly small portion of the market. The appearance of television also offered new ways to distribute, aestheticize, and see the moving-image. Both of these transformations in modes of (re)production affected how—or, indeed, whether—Bergman was seen and how his work was received. Furthermore, the advent of French New Wave and Italian auteurs, some scholars have contended, crowded Bergman out of Swedish and European intellectual circles. This is a limited portrait of the environment which launched Through a Glass Darkly.

Up until that point, however, critiques had not taken Bergman to task for the inferiority of his writing or disparaged him personally—at least not to the degree Riffe had. Prior to the publication of the third issue of Chaplin, Bergman had revealed Riffe to be a personal pseudonym. Bergman recalled in a later interview: “I experienced a special freedom in collecting my innermost self-criticism (which, to some extent, matched the criticism directed at me from outside), verbalizing it, tricking it out to seem a bad Swedish translation from the French, and then opening Expressen to read: ‘This is the best statement about Ingmar Bergman in recent years.’”

Much has been made of Bergman’s thematic and artistic interests, and how these questions are uniquely bound to Bergman’s life: he is serious and deals with serious issues, he is interested in existential truths, he is of a bad temperament and difficult, etc. To some degree, Bergman’s trick speaks to that. Less, I think, has been made of the way Bergman gets at these serious, difficult, existential truths through play and playfulness of varying kinds and of varying effects.

This idea of play can be understood in different ways. For one, Bergman was an active producer and consumer of different media—film, theatre, television, music, writing, etc.—and was interested in how various art forms might have resonances with and could speak through one another. Music and theatre were such forms. Married at the time to renowned concert pianist Käbi Laretei and intrigued by music more generally, Bergman noted in interviews before the release of Through a Glass Darkly that he was interested in structuring his films not as symphonies but in the chamber music format of Beethoven and Bartók. Indeed, Bergman’s initial choice (later renounced as a “decoy for eager journalists”) to compose Through a Glass Darkly as the first of a trilogy of films, including Winter Light and The Silence (both released in 1963), known as “God’s Silence” speaks to organizing music as a suite.

Moreover, Bergman was interested in the intimacy of chamber music’s format. As opposed to a “sprawling” and “grandiose” symphony, chamber music brought attention to how a few instruments—like a few actors—could interact and produce tension with each other within a confined space—such as the isolated island of Fårö, a Baltic isle that would form the setting of many of Bergman’s films.

The intimacy of space might have been on Bergman’s mind for a host of other reasons, all related to his interest in other media. Just four years prior, Bergman had made his directorial debut on television with Mr. Sleeman Is Coming and went on to direct three more television films before the release of Through a Glass Darkly. In interviews, Bergman had admitted that “television was his new theater,” which brought new artistic, technical, and commercial freedoms and constraints. Among other things, this new context prompted Bergman to work exclusively with director of photography and “sculptor of light” Sven Nykvist over the next thirty years.

Bergman's merging of cinema, theater and chamber music allowed for an exposition of interior lives and an intimate look at the tense, textured relationships between people. Perhaps no better example of this is Minus’s (Lars Passgård) intimate—chamber?—play, “The Artistic Haunting; or, The Funeral Vault of Illusions,” that crowns the first act of Through a Glass Darkly. The morality play quite literally stages the questions of the film: father David (Gunnar Björnstrand) watches on as Minus, playing the artist, becomes seduced by the Princess of Castile, played by his sister, Karin (Harriet Andersson); ultimately, the Artist cannot follow the Princess “into the realm of death” and, instead, chooses to “write a poem about my meeting with the princess. Or paint a picture, or compose an opera—though the end, of course, must be given a more heroic twist.”

Artist desires woman but refrains in order to turn her and his experience into a commercial product, son desires (the position of the) father, brother desires sister, men are cold and distant, and play penetrates film.